Some Better War History

Sir: Mervyn Bendle (April 2014) has again provided a timely response to attacks on the Anzac tradition.

Like him, I think there are some merits in James Brown’s Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession, not least his call for greater care for service personnel and veterans, and for more serious consideration of questions of defence.

However, I am dismayed by much of the material and a lack of depth in Joan Beaumont’s Broken Nation insofar as I can understand it. I have no first-hand knowledge of pre-Second World War Australia, although I grew up during the war years among those who did. There is a direct knowledge of the 1940s and indirectly of earlier years possessed by my generation which many scholars of today do not always accurately retrieve.

I am also bewildered to learn of some attacks on the Anzac tradition made by lecturers in, of all places, the Australian Defence Academy. However, at least two Canberra academics have recently provided substantial redress.

To the long list of works in the Australian Army History Collection, Dr Michael Gladwin has added Captains of the Soul: A History of Australian Army Chaplains (Big Sky Publishing). It is a thorough, clearly written and enlightening account of military chaplains set in context, ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day. The chapter “The Crucible: Australian Army Chaplains and the Great War” includes moving accounts of their experience on the battlefields and in the trenches.

Even more important, I think, is a book launched at the end of last year, but not yet, for some reason, promoted in the bookshops. It is Anzac Day Origins: Canon D.J. Garland and Trans-Tasman Commemoration (Barton Books). One of its authors is a New Zealander, Dr George F. Davis; the other is Dr John Moses, an Anglican priest and historian who long taught in the University of Queensland and was an Adjunct Professor at the University of New England.

The fascinating, little-known story of Canon Garland is prefaced with two important chapters, “Australia, the Empire, and Imperial Germany, 1901–1914” and “New Zealand and the German Threat, 1900–1914”. Here the book reflects especially the solid scholarship of John Moses and his years of study in this field. His earlier publications on the subject are listed in his paper, “Anzac Day as Australia’s All Souls’ Day: Canon David Garland’s Vision for Commemoration of the Fallen”. One would especially commend his earlier book, The Politics of Illusion: The Fischer Controversy in German Historiography (1975). Also pertinent is his more recent The Reluctant Revolutionary: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Collision with Prusso-German History (2009/2014).

This year and next, when our involvement in the First World War will be widely discussed, I hope the work of Moses and Davis will be heeded by younger historians, especially those whose present work sometimes seems superficial and biased.

John Bunyan
Campbelltown, NSW

Popular History and Historical Balance

Sir: Purveyors of historical revision are, no doubt, occasionally affected by the vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself with a well-known consequence. Some of the military historians bagged by Mervyn Bendle might perhaps suffer from this in places, but his indiscriminate assault on able and articulate scholars itself deserves to come a cropper.

One must hope that the historians under Mr Bendle’s harrow are not alone in seeking to strip some of the luxurious growth from the standard (as it seems) presentations of the Anzac story; and if they cast a critical eye on, for instance, “the intrinsically anti-elitist and egalitarian … image of the exceptional Digger”, then so be it. They need not be the kind of old lefties which he denounces, or members of an alleged “Australian historians’ guild where groupthink is a required characteristic”.

The forthcoming commemorations of the Kaiser’s War and “Anzac” might not turn into orgies, but on present showings they might well be akin to Saturnalias or endless binges. If some sort of balance can be inserted into the public mind, good might come of it. Perhaps the popular histories admired by Mr Bendle fail to do this.

Boring old academic historians who delve into archives in search of data (despised by the late C.M.H. Clark as well as Mr Bendle) might well be ultimately more useful. Their findings are by no means at odds with respect for “those who sacrificed their lives on their nation’s behalf”—and on behalf of entities rather wider than their “nation”—which surely is the true reason for marking Anzac Day and Remembrance Day.

Bruce Knox
Mont Albert, Vic

Brisbane in Wartime

Sir: The “Thanksgiving Day” story by Jean Thornton (January-February 2014) brought back some distant memories.

I spent my early life during the Depression years in rural Queensland. I joined the RAAF in Cunnamulla where I was put into temporary ground staff to avoid being called up by the militia, and posted to Brisbane to serve in Signals in the old AMP building right above General Macarthur’s headquarters.

I was billeted in a boarding house on St Paul’s Terrace and walked down to my shift work, on most occasions breakfasting in the American Red Cross on the corner of Creek and Adelaide streets diagonally opposite the American Post X. I was always made most welcome, and like “Betty” of the story ran across many “ships that pass in the night” among the host of American servicemen who passed through Brisbane.

They were something of a godsend to the local girls with their exotic charm and, more pointedly, chocolates, nylon stockings and cartons of cigarettes (everyone smoked). I was not at an age for serious liaisons, unlike Australian servicemen returning from a stint in the Middle East. They found the playing field tilted in favour of the “overpaid, overdressed, oversexed and over here” brigade that confronted them on their return to hearth and home. Tensions exploded one night at the PX and firearms devised for wartime use were deployed domestically. A Jeep filled with hand grenades was allegedly intercepted on its way back from Enoggera Barracks. Reaction was swift and every available policeman from the resident civilian force and from each of the three arms of the Australian and American services patrolled the streets to break up any group of more than three people. Peace of a sort ensued.

Things moved on. I transferred from temporary groundcrew into aircrew and travelled in time to the United Kingdom via an American ship to the United States, crossing from west to east by train. The Americans on their home turf were extremely hospitable. Anyone in uniform was lionised.

I came back from my European stint in Bomber Command to a very different Brisbane from that which I left. The Americans had gone but had left an indelible mark. Some of the wartime dalliances had resulted in marriage, most of them I think successful.

With VP Day the Australian troops returned again but this time to a level playing field. That period had been a turning point for Brisbane. The impressive American War Memorial in Newstead Park marks where it all began.

L. Peter Ryan
(via e-mail)